Nursery reading levels

[Anama]

Hi, DS is in nursery right now, 4.8 yrs, currently reads ORT stage 10 white band books by himself. Is this within the normal reading range? Has anyone else had similar experiences?

My DD2 was reading similar at this age, she loved the ORT books, thankfully she is way beyond them now!

Hi, that's great to hear. Did you find that there was any significant benefit to her reading at that level and beyond?

There are vast differences in reading ability at this age. Some children are free reading by the time they start Reception and others take longer to reach that level. However it is important to work not only on decoding but comprehension. Being an early reader does not automatically mean the child will develop a love of reading as my ds 7 yo has taught me .

The greatest benefit, 2 years on, is that she loves reading. What more could I ask for?

My DS is also 4.8 and loves reading, he reads with great emotion and says'oops sorry' if he gets any emphasis or his pitch wrong, if we discuss what he is reading he always understands everything & will often sit & read & then tell me what is happening so I have no worries regarding comprehension. There are well regarded Reading Age tests available online & he scored 10.11 on both. I wish he wasn't able to do this as well as spell, count to a million, do sums, write, ask amazingly deep and profound questions (though this can be very funny), tell the time etc. etc. but he has taught himself because he adores books, has an incredible memory so only ever needs to be told anything once or twice & just loves absorbing information. I am desperate to ensure that all this harnessed at school & he doesn't get bored & switch off. Why can't people be more supportive on this site having a gifted child is NOT a great thing it is very difficult & as parents we are NOT showing off just trying to find answers & support. I have no idea what ORT white band is & no idea whether this is the 'normal' level for reception as no one is answering the post properly!!!!

"Why can't people be more supportive on this site having a gifted child is NOT a great thing it is very difficult"

Why can't parents accept that gifted children are all different?

Some find being gifted very difficult, others do not. Some combine giftedness with great social skills and an interest in people which means any social situation is going to be interesting to them, regardless of whether it involves their intellectual side or not. Just as some intellectually gifted children are also highly musical and others are not.

Others need to be stimulated through this one thing that is their intellectual side. There is no such thing as the gifted child; they all have their own personalities.

The same holds true at the other end of the educational scale: as a university teacher I have come across a smallish number of students who have been well and truly gifted= on a totally different level from everybody else, including their tutors. But they have had vastly varying personalities: some have been socially awkward, come across as geeky, or very sensitive and withdrawn. Others have come across as your typical, pretty, funloving undergraduate until I looked at their work and then- phhew! There just isn't a way you can look at somebody in a social situation and evaluate how gifted they are.

Some highly gifted people have Aspergers traits, others do not. Some people have Aspergers traits but are not highly gifted. The difference is that if you are gifted, any difficulties are likely to be ascribed to giftedness, but if you are of average intelligence and have Aspergers, noone is going to say your average intelligence is due to your having Aspergers.

Obviously websites in support of gifted children are going to be skewed in the direction of a certain type of child: parents of the kind of child who can self-stimulate and does well socially are unlikely to feel the need to contact a support group, however brilliant the child actually is.

I think we should all support each other, by pointing out that gifted children like other children need their individual needs met.

This is not being negative: one might equally say that stating categorically that all gifted children have problems is being negative towards children who do not.

If parents of gifted and struggling children want others to be supportive, perhaps they should try being supportive of other parents, such as parents of non-gifted and struggling children and parents of gifted but non-struggling children. Not hinting that only children who fit a certain mould can be gifted. But if they think a parent is unsupportive just because they point out that their own gifted child does not fit this description, then they are in essence saying that only their child is "right".

I am not a big fan of the ORT and have steered clear of it as far as possible, but I have just had a look at the teachers' chart on the oxford reading tree site. It puts stages 10 and 11 in the age 7-8 band. So a 4.8 year old reading at this level fluently is "above expected levels". Although this is advanced I don't think it is that unusual, especially if a child has had lots of encouragement at home. I believe, however, that it is rare for a very young child to largely teach themselves to read. This is my experience and the difference between my two daughters. Telling/understanding the time fully is very complex and beyond most 4 year olds.
I agree that gifted children can be as different from each other as can any child. We also all have different ideas of what "gifted" actually is. I personally do not like the term at all. However that is the word that is used and we all, presumably, look at these threads because we are interested or have questions and concerns that we want to share.
I love my 3 children and wouldn't change a thing about them, but I haven't been able to discuss the "gifted" one with other parents in the same way as the other two. That's the reason that I have come to this site.
I think we should respect that most parents know their children best and genuinely want some support or advice without the face to face worries of appearing a show off or pushy or misguided.

Ds didn't read the ORT, the nursery tried to give him the first stage (there were just pictures, no text) but as he could already read it was pointless. He found joke books interesting though. I bet I'm not helping am I.

My DM always used to tell people how clever my DB was because he would tell the time when he was 5.

One day I happened to ask DM who taught DB how to tell the time. She replied "You did, how can you forget something like that".

It went completely over the top of her head that at the time I was 7 and completely on my own taught my 5 year old brother how to tell the time.

I think it's way above average OP. My DD is in reception (almost at the end now clearly) and reading ORT level 2. She is in no way behind in her class and definitely considered very able by the teacher. So I would say that your child is way above expectations for their age. I am susrprised none of the professionals (ie the teachers) have commented on it yet!!!!!

Also worth noting that my DD's school achieves top grades nationally in year 6 so what I am trying to say is that she is not in a sink school lol

Hope this helps. Oh and they didn't even start on reading books until Jan in reception.

Hi, My son is reading ORT stage 6 and he is 5 and in Reception class.

Your son is probably reading above the level one would expect for his age. Some children are still struggling with level 1 in yr 2. This doesn't mean his reading will always be in advance or that he will be a prolific reader. DS1 9yrs was reading in advance of level 10 when he was 4yrs but as things have panned out, he is behind where I was at his age. I didn't start reading until I was 7. I'm a rather boring bookworm now! I find it irritating to have to look where I'm walking and if I had nothing to read, might even go mad.

Its brilliant that he is interested in books, long may it continue!

Why can't parents accept that gifted children are all different?

I couldn't agree more. DS was a free reader and doing complex maths in Reception - he is now nearly 13 and a very sociable emotionally aware child who spends most of his spare time on a football pitch. He has slotted well into the top half of his year at Grammar School.

I suspect I have Aspergers myself (at the lower end of the severity range - if I say 'mild' someone is going to tell me there's no such thing) and DD is more like me as well as being less obviously gifted than her brother - at 4 3/4 her reading age is 'only' 7 1/2.

I attended the NAGC sessions with my son but didn't find them that helpful as most of the children were 'gifted with other issues' - Aspergers, dyslexia etc and my son just wanted to make friends other children and play with. I am not sure my daughter is particularly gifted but she does have some of the issues the other NAGC children did.

I would say that's very high, My reception aged child is "gifted" and is currently readinf orange book band which is a good few bands below white i believe.

DS is now 5.6 , can read Harry Potter and work out all his times tables. After spending a few years worrying about whether or not he is 'gifted' I would say it doesn't really matter now. What matters is his own drive and passion for a particular subject or activity. If he does show interest for something in particular then I will help him pursue it and see where it leads. Being gifted in itself is neither here nor there in the long run. I think determination, drive, perseverance and passion are far more important things to have than giftedness.

I did find Deborah Ruf?s levels of giftedness very useful in comparing his giftedness with others who showed similar abilities at his age. I would also be curious to see what his score on the SB-LM IQ test would be, as it scales in excess of 220, just so I can put a number on it. It does help knowing what is possible for your gifted child to achieve academically when you can compare the achievements of other gifted kids with similar IQ scores. For example what American SAT score should he aim for and so on. None of this matters if the child has no goals or passions of his own.

Hello all - new to this board.

My first (girl) could read at 2 1/2 and it scared us, given that she was no.1 and we had absolutely no idea how to handle it. She basically taught herself to read, once we'd got her head around the phonics.

We used a whole bunch of different books but included a large amount of the ORT 'Read at home' series and also a daft lot of Ladybird books called 'Puddle Lane' which came straight out of the seventies, all magicians and fantasy stories but in fact, N liked those best.

She now, age 7 has read all the Harry Potters up to half way through the penultimate one - she self-censored but we have constantly had the problem of trying to match her maturity against her reading age. For a long, long time she couldn't read anything with much more than a gentle sense of slight threat. It was extremely difficult to keep up with her and keep shoving suitable books under her nose (thank you universe for Clever Polly and Pippi Longstocking!).

Our second, J, by contrast, just turned 5 at the weekend and is just managing to read level 2-ish sorts of books back to me, with a few hiccups occasionally. Of course, for a while we thought he was behind, given our bizarre expectations, whereas of course, he's doing perfectly well and is a happy little boy who has a good brain in there but is just doing things in a different order! Everyone's different.

In short, reading by 2 1/2 is not a problem. It's a freak-out, but not a problem.

lol zoonie - dd1 did the same thing with the harry potters at the same age - and self censored at the same point. if it helps, she's just gone back and re-read them all the way through again (including the whole of the last one) at 11. the only reason she went back is because dd2 (who's now 7 lol) is reading them. dd1 is now fascinated by the 'harry as adult' bit at the end. but she's into the hunger games and that sort of thing now, so i think she'd forgotten all about poor wee harry.

anama - had never heard of sb-lm so looked it up. dd2 was wechsler tested and falls into the category suggested for sb-lm testing (iq higher than 139) - but apparently kids who wechsler test above 139, sb-lm test above 160? eh?

i know you said 'just so i can put a number on it' - but why?

I'd take care with ORT - my DD is currently on Stage 11 and has had books home with, I think, content that is completely inappropriate for her age (6).

For example, the Tower Of London book has a glossary (which the homework sheet encourages the children to look at) where the first word is 'Adultery' and the definition is 'sleeping with someone other than your husband or wife' (cue awkward questions like 'but I sleep with my cousins on holiday, etc, etc).

The next week they received War Child, with a double page spread on The Final Solution, including references to gassing Jewish children, gay men and the disabled. I'd have a quick flick through the content if I were you (although maybe at your child's school the teachers actually bother to do this )!

(It's a bug bear of mine that the school continue to plough through the ORT when DD and her group are capable of reading 'proper' books with meat on the bones and stories to explore and I HATE the 'one size fits all' homework sheets that come with it! )

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that ORT have some quite bizarre material aimed at 6-7yo children. There was one (stage 7 I think) that had soldiers coming to take away the father and kill him. At one point he was cowering in a cupboard while the mother sobbed in terror DS1 was really upset by that - to the extent that he had trouble sleeping. I vet all reading material he brings home from school now (he used to get started on his reading in the car).

HI. My ds was tested on the sblm after testing beyond the ceiling of the wisc. He tested way beyond 200+. However they cannot be compared to each, as they have different standared deviations(16 and 15) I have found it more useful to use percentiles.

The sblm is an outdated test, last normed in 1972 and favours verbal kids. you would be better to use the sbV, ds was also susequently tested on this.

Ds is a level 5 on Ruffs scale. A lot of people find that her criteria are useful, others find them useless. Have you read her book.

Why is it useful to have numbers?

Bright child=give him loads of interesting stuff to read and do. And keep doing it until you reach the limit of his capabilities.

And make sure you also get him doing loads of other stuff. Sport, musical instuments, making things....veging in front of The Simpsons.

Not bright child=test him until you have some sort of arbitrary percentage analysis of exactly how bright. At what? Compared to who?

It is not just a matter of getting a number Seeker. It is a profile of strengths and weaknesses and how they can cause frustration and problems in a child if there is too much scatter in certain areas.

My ds was tested on the insistence of a consultant within CAMHS who felt that ds's diagnosis of ADHD and ASD was not really getting to the bottom of what was causing his massive problems at home and school and his worsening depression and SIB.

He surprised us all with his score and I was able to secure him a far more appropriate education with radical accelarartion and individualised teaching to the level he needed. I would never have been able to do that without the number and the profile of S+W that I got from his testing.

It is all very well to say Bright child=give him loads of interesting stuff to read and do. And keep doing it until you reach the limit of his capabilities

Sometimes that simply is not enough and you have to do more and go further until you find the root cause and the way forward. My ds was at the point of serious self harm and needed radical intervention I am glad I did what I did. He is now happy and engaged.

I get fed up with judgement of my and others' decision to test. There are a myriad of reasons why people do. You know, walk a mile in my shoes and all that.

Op your ds sounds delightful and bright. I hope he will be happy.

evilclown - I was, of course, not talking about children who have special needs diagnosed - in that case you have to do whatever you need to do to get the best possible outcome for your child.

But this thread, as far as I know, is about a bright NT child.

A very different matter.